The Celestial Steam Locomotive (The Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  Agonistes took a thousand-year egg from the basket and popped it. A faint miasma drifted from the crack in the shell.

  A voice said, “To the descendants of me, Anatole Ecks, hello. I hope you are in good health. I have concealed a casket beneath a rock in Cavaha which I think you...” The voice faded out. Agonistes crumbled the shell and allowed it to fall to the sand in fragments.

  “A dud.”

  “How much did you pay for them, you old fool?” Enchantress, equally old, asked.

  “It’s not the treasure that matters. I’ve never followed up anything I’ve heard from an egg. I just like to hear those voices from the past. I like to imagine what the people were like.” Agonistes’ voice was wistful. He was old, almost a century old, and he clung to the past like life itself.

  “Did it ever occur to you that the eggs could be fakes?” This from Sudden, a pouting, proud youth.

  “They have the ring of truth. The merchant told me they were part of a cache at least twenty-two centuries old, and I believe him.” He cracked another, reverently.

  A stink of hydrogen sulfide. The egg uttered a string of obscenities, ending with a cackle of derision.

  “That tells me something about the people, too,” said Agonistes.

  “Yes. They were just like us.”

  Now Maya spoke for the first time. “They were frightened of dying—as we are—so they had to leave a bit of themselves behind. A word, a legacy, sometimes a last stab of vindictiveness. They couldn’t know it would become a racket, that eggs would change hands at high prices because so many of them contained directions to hidden treasure. They couldn’t know that the descendants of wealthy folk would sell them unopened to the highest bidder.”

  “Some folk aren’t so frightened of dying, I hear,” said Enchantress, with that deep portentousness of the aged.

  “The Hosts? You’ve heard of them recently?” Sudden looked interested.

  “There are rumors again.”

  “I’ve heard the same rumors every few years, all my life,” said Agonistes skeptically. “Every few years there’s a witch hunt: The Hosts are among us! It’s nonsense. The Hosts died out two thousand years ago—or else they were killed.”

  Enchantress said cunningly, “Maya doesn’t seem to age. Maybe we should report her to the authorities.”

  Maya merely smiled.

  “What exactly were the Hosts, anyway, Maya?” asked Sudden. Maya was acknowledged to be the history student among them, young though she was.

  She seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient events—which

  lent a barb to Enchantress’s comment.

  “The Hosts were humans like us. Or maybe a little more than human.”

  “Like the Specialists? Animals? No wonder they were wiped out. Maybe we should do the same favor for the Specialists.”

  “Enchantress,” said Agonistes equably, “you don’t improve with age.”

  “At least I still have possession of my faculties.” Her tone was spiteful. Maya watched her sadly, Sudden with delighted interest. Another quarrel would brighten this dull day. “At least I wasn’t thrown out of the Guild...”

  “You were never in the Guild.”

  “Tell us what happened, old man. Tell us why they threw you out.” Sudden joined in, goading. “Cowardice, wasn’t it? You lost your ship to the Bale Wolves?”

  “I heard...” said Maya quietly, “Rowena’s alive...”

  The old man watched her for a moment, then nodded. “I heard that too, girl. Alive, after all these years. They say the Bale Wolves held her prisoner—for seventy years... Imagine that. I wonder...”

  Enchantress cackled. “You wonder if she’ll come? You’re dreading that, I’ll bet. To be faced with the woman you lost to the enemy. To be faced with the past, with your incompetence. Think of that, old man. Any moment she might step from the Pillar...”

  The Pillar was a tall edifice nearby, a kind of monument whose origins were lost in antiquity, but that seemed to act as a magnet upon which the lines of force of the Greataway converged. It was a couple of meters tall and pockmarked with meteorite scars.

  As though on cue, a figure suddenly appeared before it.

  Agonistes drew in a sharp breath.

  But it was a young girl, even younger than Maya. She looked at them uncertainly, sizing them up. She wore a tiny white skirt and her body glowed and glittered with gold and jewelry. She was small and unreal, and all that wealth sat uneasily on her, like a crown on a baby. She took three halting steps toward them. She wanted to travel on, and no questions asked, which was why she had come via this remote asteroid instead of using the Guild and the authorized routes of the Greataway. Ropes of diamonds in gold settings hung coldly against her warm, bare breasts.

  Sudden said, “I’m Sudden and I have the mynde. I can take you anywhere you want to go.”

  Enchantress said, “Anywhere is right. With this young fool you don’t know where you’ll end up, my dear. Let me take you.”

  The girl said, “I don’t mind where I go. Anywhere. Where is this?”

  “Valta, an asteroid stage. Abandoned now, except for us.”

  Agonistes was silent, having reasons of his own for not wanting a fare at this time. Sudden took the girl’s hand and talked to her quietly; then the two of them disappeared as they stood.

  “Well... At least he got the first part right.” Enchantress turned to Agonistes, ready to renew the offensive.

  He said quickly, “You were telling us about the Hosts, Maya.”

  And Maya’s face seemed to go a little out of focus, the way it always did when she reached back into the long-gone past. The shacks of the shantytown beyond the Pillar looked sharp-edged by comparison. It is as though Maya is not quite here on these occasions, thought Agonistes.

  “It began on a planet called Talk-to-Yourself almost two thousand years ago,” said Maya, “but the Macrobes weren’t isolated until later, when they’d spread among a thousand or more people. A Specialist brought the Macrobes back, unknowingly. She was a ship’s captain...”

  Agonistes shivered. Enchantress frowned.

  Maya shimmered... In her mind something happened; in her mind and body, in space and time. An echo of a refrain came to her, a couplet from a song that wasn’t written yet...

  The Captain was a Specialist of feline-human link.

  She brought to Earth the captivating seeds of Inner Think

  Inner what? And why did the captain, some faceless half-woman, suddenly assume in her mind the image of a heroine? What did Inner Think mean, and why did it seem to be good? And yet, was it good? Changes of style, changes of thought and attitude ran through her mind, dizzying her. The Macrobes were bad. Humans had said they were bad.

  “The Macrobes possessed their host and altered his behavior,” she said determinedly. “They lived in a colorless, waterlike fluid called bor, which was at first looked on as a mild euphoric, and not addictive. Bor heightened the senses and the emotions, and even seemed to increase intelligence. After a while it was found that the effect was permanent and the user didn’t need bor any more—but he remained just a little more aware than he was before. Then it was discovered that if a drop of bor was added to ordinary water, the water became bor. So something within bor was multiplying—and soon the Macrobes were isolated.”

  “You know so much, dear,” remarked Enchantress, her eyes like little black stones.

  “However, a lot of people had been infected. There was a fear the whole ocean could turn to bor, but then they found that the Macrobes died if bor

  was diluted too much—apparently they reproduced sexually, and dilution of bor meant they died before they could reach one another.”

  “But what were they like?” asked Agonistes.

  “They were small organisms with a very strong sense of self-preservation. They increased the host’s metabolism, made him wary, alert, content, potent, happy, scared, all of those things and more—anything appropriate to the given moment t
hat would have the effect of helping him to keep alive, and so keep his Macrobes alive.

  “But in a way the Macrobes were self-defeating, because when they increased a host’s metabolic rate they decreased his life expectancy. Possibly this didn’t happen on their home planet; in any case, it was a drawback to their life on Earth. So they evolved further... They entered the very chromosomes of their host, thus ensuring their survival for as long as humans existed. They became a gene, a hereditary trait. In effect they changed Mankind—or at least that section of Mankind through which they spread.”

  “Horrible...” said Enchantress.

  And Sudden was back with them, grinning smugly, a gold chain hung around his neck. He sat down, listening.

  “Mankind had two choices. Bor had long since disappeared except for a single, closely guarded laboratory specimen. But the Macrobes lived on in their hosts, and these hosts were a little better than ordinary people. They did not, however, live as long, which could be construed as bad. So it was decided they should not be allowed to have children...” Maya blinked, visibly returning to the present. “It was the only way,” she concluded.

  Sudden said, “She paid me well. Very well... Your history is dull, Maya. I like history about people, not bugs. Real history, like why this old man got thrown out of the Guild and had to come to this place to try to earn a living in competition with crooks like us.”

  “Somebody’s coming...” said Maya.

  Agonistes was trembling. “The Bale Wolves can jump happentracks,” he said. He remembered the confusion and Rowena screaming, and his efforts to maintain concentration while the Invisible Spaceship began to dissolve around them, threatening to leave Rowena and him unprotected and the drogues exposed. The Bale Wolves were pure evil. It’s hard to concentrate, close to anything so merciless; yet he had maintained concentration. He knew he had.

  “It doesn’t matter how good you are,” he continued. “They’ll find you out. They’ll hunt back in Time a little way and sniff out all your alternative Selves. Some of them will be a little better than you are at this given instant, and some of those Selves will be a little worse... They’ll find a weak one. They’ll find some happentrack on which you were feeling a little sicker, a little weaker, a little less brave. And they’ll attack that You. Then they’ll jump back, right beside you in your mind and your body. And you’ll scream and throw them out because you’ve been taught the way by the Guild—but just for an instant you’ll have relaxed, and the shields will be down, and the wolves will appear physically, evil brutes that can’t be killed, that can always outwit you.”

  “Excuses, old man. Your superiors knew better. They threw you out of the Guild.”

  “That was standard procedure. There is no formal trial. Nobody who’s been attacked by the Bale Wolves can ever be trusted again. There’s no blame attached to it—it’s simple fact.”

  “So what are you doing plying for hire?”

  “Short trips, that’s all...” Agonistes’ gaze shifted around. He was cornered.

  “But you never take any. You just sit here by the Pillar, year after year.”

  “It’s the Greataway... There’s something about it. It draws you, even since the Hate Bombs have restricted it. The Guild—it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I lost it all. The adventure—like nothing on Earth. The fellowship, the trust.” His sentences had become disjointed and emotional, and Sudden began to look abashed. “And Rowena... I... I loved her. That was what made it so terrible. I loved her better than all the Greataway, and I would have died for her. I tried to die for her. And yet somewhere, on some other happentrack, there was another Me who didn’t love her quite enough...”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Maya vehemently.

  Four people on a chunk of rock between Mars and Jupiter: an old, imperfect man and an old, embittered woman, a young pretender and Maya. Four people huddled beside a nodal point in the Greataway for an instant in history, remarkable only because their lives were of no consequence whatever. Nothing they did had any measurable effect on the Ifalong. In the overall scheme of things, it is difficult to understand the purpose of any of these people except Maya.

  Days or months later another Traveler came.

  Sudden saw her first.

  He stood, dashing a lock of hair away from his eyes, smiling. “I’m Sudden and I have the mynde. I can take you anywhere.”

  This woman was tall, quietly dressed and young. Her hair fell in dark waves about her shoulders, her face was pale but not pallid and there was a luster to her skin—not that skin-deep luster that comes from the rejuvenation salons, but a deeper glow of confidence and health and real youth.

  Sudden hesitated. “I... Maybe I...”

  It was her eyes, dark blue, like cobalt, and searching, moving through him, weighing him briefly and finding him inadequate. It was her step, sure and strong as she walked toward them, so that Sudden, for reasons unknown, found himself backing off. It was many things in the young woman, but mostly it was an aura of supreme intelligence... Or not quite that. Of supreme knowledge. In her short life she’d seen it all.

  Maya watched her, lips parted in a half-smile.

  Enchantress muttered, “I don’t think I...”

  This woman would have no truck with charlatans. Why had she come? She looked as though she had the mynde to travel alone, to cast off the Hate Bombs and journey to the end of the stars and absorb the knowledge of the Universe. She stopped walking and stood before them.

  She said, “Take me home now, Paul.”

  Aging is good and dying is good: Humans were right to suspect the Macrobes. Death was the first great mutation of life, and to deny death might be part of the ultimate evil.

  So the old man stood looking at the woman who had lived with the nightmare creatures and, knowing her, he knew something of what had happened. How they took her and tortured her, so that she wished for death—but they anticipated that and they denied it to her; they even denied her the hope of aging. She stayed young while they did their worst, while they tortured her, not to obtain information or for any other reason that a human might understand, but simply because they were Bale Wolves. They didn’t torture her for the fun of it, or out of hatred, but simply because of what they are.

  And she beat them.

  How Rowena beat the Bale Wolves is another story. Now she was here, just as Paul-called-Agonistes remembered her. And she remembered him too, seeing through the crackled flesh to the psycaptain underneath. “Take me home, Paul,” she said.

  Rowena is important because of what she did, but Paul is a nobody in the vastness of Time and only appears in her life because of what he can give her—because she loved him too.

  So it is of little importance that, as he walked with Rowena to the Pillar, an extraordinary thing happened to him. Maya, you see, had the power to give—just occasionally, when the situation demanded.

  As they held hands before winking out, the years melted away from the body of Paul-Agonistes until he was as young as the beautiful woman he stood beside. But her smile as she watched him didn’t change and Maya wondered if she even noticed the difference. Then they were gone.

  Enchantress noticed the difference. “Did you see what I... No, it couldn’t have been. Forget it.” She was still old herself, and would remain so until she died. Something ate at her inside. A fury grew. “Why should she ask him to take her, after what happened?”

  “That... Was that... No, it couldn’t have been the Rowena he was always talking about.” Sudden spoke haltingly, still dazed.

  “It was, it was.” Enchantress spat the words. “And do you know why? Because she’s a Host, that’s why. I’m going after them.” She blundered to her feet. “I’m going to turn her in to the authorities if I have to follow her to the ends of the Greataway!”

  “Stay where you are, Enchantress,” Maya said. “You’ll never find them.”

  “And what do you know about that? You think you know so much, but I’ve nev
er seen you travel. You and your words and your baby eyes.” Enchantress’s spite was redirected against Maya. The old woman looked at the young girl and saw everything she’d lost. “You know so much and yet you’re so young. How do you do it—tell me that! Lost your tongue, have you? Right—so that old fool and his girl got away, but I’ll see to it you don’t. You’re a Host yourself, and don’t you try denying it! You’re for recycling, my girl!”

  Maya shrugged, smiled and walked away. “The Macrobes evolved into a recessive gene. It was their last defense during the Pogrom of the Hosts. You won’t find any of them around.”

  “How do you know all that, eh?”

  “I remember things, that’s all.”

  And she strolled off past the Pillar with an odd vision swirling like a mist in her mind—a vision of a beach, blue sky and blue sea—things she’d never seen. She heard words too, quiet words of a thoughtful mind: But love should be a simple thing of silence, with no need to justify.

  She wondered what they meant, and what the beach and sky and sea meant. Her mind was a curious thing, the way it conjured up these visions. And what was love? What really was love? And who was this mind speaking to her from a long way off—or was she simply eavesdropping on a mind talking to itself? One thing was certain—the mind spoke in the future. Whenever she’d had a vision of something unrecognizable, it was in the future; she’d proved that by experiment.

  Now the vision was fading as she reached her living quarters. She was left with the afterimage of a tiny creature yawning and stretching and coming awake in the body of a young man after a thousand years’ slumber. The young man was talking to the creature, of course, not to himself. He was reasoning with the benign parasites in his body and persuading them to help him to do what was best for both of them—and this did not mean speeding up his metabolism. He was in fact practicing the crude and undeveloped beginnings of the Inner Think. Maya didn’t know this. She wondered for a while, then forgot the young man, although his quiet words stayed with her as she greeted her ancient mother and made herself ready for the night.